The 3 Real Reasons People Want a God

Indiziert: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]Why do people want to God so bad? This is a deceptively good question. I really took some time to think about it because at first I thought this is too obvious, but then I realized that all the answers I was going to give are the surface level answers. They're still very deep in their own right, but they all add up to the same thing. This would be like because people are afraid of death, because suffering is so unbearable without an objective purpose, because chaos makes us crave control, because we want to be reunited with our loved ones, because injustice is not fun to deal with and we want some kind of cosmic justice or in some cases payback, but all of those again roll up to why we want comfort so bad and God being an answer for some people for comfort. But that doesn't actually fully explain why people specifically want a God. God is so much more than just comfort. He is a king. He is a judge. He is a parent, a witness to our lives, a lawgiver, a rescuer, a punisher, a narrator, and then again, a comforter. So, the real question is why do people want there to be this mind, this personal aspect behind the universe? And so, I came up with three, I think, more nuanced and unique answers to this question. One is that people want reality to be personal.

[00:01:32]We want the universe to know us. I think a lot of this boils down to ego. A cold, uncaring, non-personal universe or reality can still be beautiful, it can still inspire awe, and contain love and friendship and transcendent moments, but it doesn't look back. It doesn't notice us. We are not observed and thus it cannot remember, and it cannot validate our experience. And I think for a lot of people that feels heavy and quite unbearable. We talk all the time on the channel about if you can have meaning without God and the difference between subjective and objective meaning. But I do see legitimately a disconnect for people who even get on board with, "Yeah, we can still have meaning without God." But that meaning feels incomplete to them unless it is recognized by something bigger than ourselves. And actually right there I think is why prayer matters so much to so many people. We always think of prayer as asking for something or trying to get God to do something, trying to help you, trying to protect you. Of course there's intercessory prayer where you're doing that for someone else. But in general, psychologically speaking, prayer is this idea that your inner life has an audience, that you are not so alone.

[00:02:57]Your fear is heard. Your pain and suffering are seen. The sacrifices that you make get recorded somewhere. Your good deeds don't go unnoticed. And so yes, here I think the concept of God is so emotionally powerful. God makes reality feel relational. It could just be as simple as we want someone to be concerned over us. It's one thing to be produced by the universe, to just show up as a natural order of things, but it's another to be produced and parented. And for those of us that don't believe in a God, we don't believe in any kind of higher power than ourselves that is looking down, watching, caring, guiding, interacting, or any of those things we just covered. We want someone to know, to read our story. And I think some of that ties into the eternal nature of things that you get with God, for things to matter eternally versus just temporarily and you know how I feel about that. And by the way, I'm not saying any of this to discourage people who have arrived at the obvious conclusion that there is no personal God out there or to tell people it's better to fake and pretend to believe to get these things back, but to empathize, to sympathize with why believers believe, why people want a God, why people in the in-between or deconstructing or going through the deconversion can feel so disconnected about the whole idea of it all. I still think it's better on the other end. I still think reality is always the best and I still think there's so much beauty, but this is me truly trying to extend that I do get it.

[00:04:35]I said ego and I didn't mean that as negatively as it may have come across.

[00:04:40]By ego, I mean our deepest part. We want our deepest, truest essence to matter, to matter to something that can't forget them, that can't betray them. Although again, you can get into God clearly forgetting and betraying people in the Christian religion. But in general, I'm trying to answer this question about why we crave the higher being. And I try to remind myself of this because I know just even if I'm being as kind and respectful as possible, how offensive what I say sounds to believers because to them, I'm not just saying something as simple as you're wrong or hey, I disagree with your theology, which even that can still not be a fun thing to deal with, but it's so much deeper than that. I'm saying no one's ultimately watching, no one's keeping track, no one's coming to rescue you, no one cares in the cosmic sense. And that's a whole another loss on top of already the loss we're discussing. But we're still stuck with the problem, the reality of the situation wanting the universe to be personal doesn't make it so. Desiring there to be this God doesn't make him appear. And it's so ironic because believers will say this against the atheist all the time that we don't believe so that we can have what we want. So that we can sin more or escape accountability. But belief in God does something very similar in a different direction. It makes reality emotionally responsive. It turns existence into a relationship. It tells you the universe knows your name and cares. But again, just because this is what you want doesn't mean it's true. So if there's one person that is denying reality to get their way, I don't think it's the atheist. But that's just point one. Let's get into the second reason that I think people want there to be a God. I think people want their moral instincts to be cosmic facts. I think they want their morality woven into the very fabric of the universe. This is why they seem so dissatisfied in again the argument with Christian apologist on the topic of objective or subjective morality. I think that you can look around clearly and see that people have morals. That even atheist can be moral.

[00:07:01]If you're one of the believers who says no they can't, you're being unbelievably foolish. The slightly better but still horrendous argument is that they can't be objectively moral or they can't say that anything is right or wrong and all of those other things. But again, I think that's just a cop-out from them because they prefer their made-up system that morality has been granted and handed to them by the creator of the universe, which by the way would still make it subjective, but we've talked about that before. But they do, they want it woven into the very fabric. They want goodness to be more than a preference. And I know that it sucks that it isn't, kind of, but they do, they desire it so strongly. They want evil to actually exist because it feels better if it's more than just a social construct. And I think the big one here is they want justice to be more than just a human project, which it so clearly only is. And I really do get this. It doesn't feel good to say that things like murder and rape and slavery are merely things that most humans dislike. That's not very emotionally satisfying. They want them to be wrong with a capital W. And then the worst part is to hear the kinds of believers that say, you know, if there was no God, if I found that out, I wouldn't care. I wouldn't be held to this. And that shows their hand a little too much. And that's not speaking for all believers, but I think a lot of people don't get the beautiful experience of discovering and evolving your own personal morality based off things like empathy, compassion, and justice. And instead, are just living under this divine command theory and feeling very moral. A lot of this just comes down to feelings.

[00:08:49]What they don't like, no cosmic justice, no cosmic morality. And what they do want or like, like being seen, being cared for, being parented, having a purpose. And thus, they desire and invent God and religion. God can do that or the concept of God. He can make morality feel like gravity, past something that we just invented or that became a social utility developed over time. I think people just want their moral outrage to be backed by the universe. We all can understand that feeling, even if some of us are choosing not to pretend because of it. And I know that I've been a little bit dismissive of the believer in some cases here, but there's actually something really beautiful going on behind the scenes. I do think for some of them some of the time when they see something so atrocious that what other word could you use but evil when someone does something so terrible to an innocent child? They don't just want it to be something that we as a society discourage or make a law against. They want it to be absolutely actually wrong that it shouldn't exist.

[00:10:05]And I get that passion. I get that zeal.

[00:10:08]But putting all your eggs in that basket of cosmic justice being handed out after the fact that there's someone watching who's going to take care of everything, that can have such an inverse effect for actually making things better or alleviating more suffering. I think the best thing you can do is be honest about morality and meet it where it's at and address justice where it is and with what we can do, not opting out of it because God's got it. And that's very frightening, but frightening does not mean false. And that is the false equivalency that is made constantly by believers. And then many have the audacity to say that when we no longer believe that we're actually rejecting God and that when we're rejecting God, what must we actually be rejecting then?

[00:10:58]Morality because they've tied the two together. I can tell you that a huge part of me waking up to the fact this God could not exist was me caring so deeply and looking so earnestly at morality. So it's quite the opposite for me and for many others. I don't want a morality that is only subject to the will of a God, especially a God with the nature that is described in the Bible. That makes it terribly flexible, first of all, which is not ideal for law and order. And also, you can be on the wrong side so quickly. You can make excuses about when God commanded one group to kill another group, why that was moral until you're the other group. Maybe no one should be killing innocent people in general.

[00:11:47]Maybe there shouldn't be justification based off chosen people or land or what someone's great great grandfather did that makes these terrible things somehow holy. So, yes, you can say, "Well, without God, your moral opinion is just that. It's an opinion." Yep, so is yours. One of us is just not pretending.

[00:12:08]But still, I understand the desire, and I think we've said enough about that for the second reason that people desperately want there to be a God. Now, the third one does have to do with comfort, which is what I said all the others boiled up to. In fact, even my first two still have. I just think we're looking at it in a more nuanced way. But the third one is that people want a story, a narrative, where the pain is not wasted. One thing that it is for sure to be human is to have suffered. We all have that. We all have the pain. And being afraid of death is one thing, but I think an even greater fear is that people's suffering meant nothing. There was no test behind it. There is no betterment that comes because you went through it. There is no paradise awaiting you. There is no cosmic trade-off that was worth it in the end.

[00:13:04]To think that the worst thing that ever happened to you will not or even cannot be redeemed or explained or balanced or used or anything else is a terribly brutal thought. So, religion and/or God gives people a huge out here.

[00:13:21]A narrative where the pain is not random, where the abuse makes you stronger, where the illness taught you dependence on your maker, where the loss had a hidden purpose that God planted there just for you to find. The unanswered prayer was actually protection by a creature greater than yourself with omniscient who knew that wasn't going to be the right move for you. The betrayal of that person prepared you for this relationship over here. The trauma that you have is actually a beautiful testimony and you can do your part in furthering the kingdom of God. But, what's hilarious for me to see is under my belief that gods and religions were constructed by man and man alone, you're already doing what you're hoping a god will do for you. You are making lemonade out of the lemons. You are finding the silver linings. I think this is what all people do, but again, wouldn't it be better to be able to do if we didn't pretend? What if we could acknowledge that, you know what? No, trauma doesn't always make you stronger.

[00:14:23]Many things just weaken you, but sometimes, under some resources and tools and understanding, it can still be used for something good. What if we strove towards that instead of just assuming that there's this cosmic karma that is working everything out that we gave the name God. Would we take more agency and responsibility and autonomy and wouldn't that be better? I think so.

[00:14:48]Religion's tricky like this, using your pain, using your fears, using your desires, which are what these three things all boil down to, to maintain itself. So much so that the ardent believer not only, of course, believes, but then thinks so much less of the non-believer who's just getting in their way, who's just so lost and confused.

[00:15:12]It's amazing how we are just seeing past each other like this and I know I'm saying that I think I have it right, but I think there is a unique difference.

[00:15:20]Not all the religions can be right, but they can all be wrong. And when you can see how clearly they fit the desires of man and how unemotionally satisfying my position is, I think there's a little bit of light in the shadow there for who again is pretending. The sad reality is some pain, most pain, is wasted. The suffering that is going on should not have happened. Many losses don't become beautiful, we simply survive them and sometimes we don't even do that. And yeah, that sounds depressing and darker at first until you get to that freedom.

[00:15:52]Because if suffering isn't sent from God, we don't have to justify it. Let us not justify it. Let us fix it. Say that was wrong. That was unfair. That shouldn't have happened. So, let's do better. Let's build differently instead of all the excuses about the secret lessons and the undersided good. No, there is no God. There's no one making this work. There's no one keeping track.

[00:16:19]It's up to us. That's real. It's real freedom, which equals real responsibility. And I think both are terrifying to the believer. Thus again, why we have the great pretend. I have the most special treat on Sunday. Until then, keep thinking. Thank you to my top-tiers of support, my iconoclasts and Boris, Chris, Grace, Deal, Narly, Will, Grant, GVI, Jimmy, Joe, Kiboga, Matthew, Perry, and Sean. My humanist heroes, Chris, Craig, James, Jared, and Christie. My atheist advocates, Aquitar, Caleb, Caleb, Dakota, Dan, Drew, Jeff, Jeffrey, Jeremy, Jugs, Julie, Paul, Reggae, Sparky, and Thomas. As well as all of my secular scholar patrons. If you enjoy Mind Shift, would you consider joining these fine people? Thanks and have a great day.